Filed in Football, English League, Premiership.
If ever there was a case for a fifth official with access to video replays it was in this Saturday’s, Everton vs Watford game. The game end 2-1 to Everton, with Everton being awarded a penalty which should have never been given.
The penalty was awarded for handball in the area when the replay clearly shows the ball hitting Chris Powell (Watford) in the middle of the forehead. This gets us to ask did ref have a clear view, did the linesman see anything. While the last call does go to the referee and rightly so, they do have assistants that sometimes refs don’t always appear to make the best use of (probably not the case but it does feel like it sometimes).
So lets assume the ref was in a position to see and was a quirk of the angle making it look like handball or the linesman made a similar call and told the ref, and it was just one of those calls in football that wasn’t really anyone’s fault but was just a bad one because of a line of sight quirk.
Now I’m not really one to advocate the use of video evidence and certainly wouldn’t want the game stopped every two minutes to look at something but have come to the conclusion that where video evidence is available it should be used to aid in deciding game changing decisions such as penalty calls, sending offs, goals and maybe one or two other things.
Monday, August 28th 2006 at 4:18 pm
Didn’t see the match but I’m a little appalled by the quality of the referee-ship in the EPL. The situation here in the USA with the MLS is absolutely rediculous. We have a coach here in New England named Steve Nichol from Scotland and I’m not sure how he has not gone insane so far (a ref called offside on a throw in last week.)